…been rumored that Putter slept beneath the last Jackson Pollock drip painting in private hands. “We’re taking 60 works from the house and about 60 works from Quadrus,” Anderson says, raising the question of whether Quadrus will now be closed and the walls of his home will now be bare. “Even now, with the gift, we still have 700 works left,” he says. “But they’re not the irreplaceables. The irreplaceables are here (at Stanford).” The irreplaceable…

For the past 44 years, a pivotal painting in the evolution of American Modern art in the exhausted aftermath of World War II has hung in a private home in an affluent San Francisco suburb — first in a child’s bedroom and then over a dining room credenza. Jackson Pollock’s “Lucifer” (1947) is the canvas in which the artist’s tentative experiments with a revolutionary new way of painting first took flight. Now the pa…

…s conjured depth, might be my favorite piece in the whole collection. I don’t think it’s my imagination that the works here play off of one another in livelier, sometimes wittier ways than museum works often do; it feels like there’s a synergy to the entire collection, which is maybe another way of saying the collectors have an eye. The Andersons have given the public a great gift, and I hope the newer generation of local billionaires is paying a…

…eum quietly serves up a visual banquet. By Lydia Lee It’s tempting for designers to try to turn art museums into works of art themselves. But what if the client’s directive is just the opposite? A new campus museum in the Bay Area by the New York–based firm Ennead Architects may disappoint those hoping for a bigger architectural statement. However, as designed to house the 121 works of the Anderson Collection, a choice selection of postwar Americ…

A testament to the burgeoning arts scene at Stanford, the Anderson Collection is home to 121 paintings and sculptures created by some of the most prominent American modern and contemporary artists — several of them hailing from the Bay Area. Below are five of the most striking pieces on display at the Anderson Collection. 1. “The Beaubourg” by San Francis One of the only pieces housed on the first floor of the Anderson Collection, it is difficul…

…s Sept. 14 and runs through Aug. 14, 2017. The Anderson Collection is located at 314 Lomita Drive on campus. The works in the Nick Cave exhibition are on loan from the Anderson family, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and private collectors. Genre-crossing works Cave, born in Missouri and now based in Chicago, is the director of the graduate fashion program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is known for his Soundsuits, which…

…rtin, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, David Park, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella and Wayne Thiebaud. Key individual works include Jackson Pollock’s Lucifer, Willem de Kooning’s Woman Standing – Pink, Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #60, Sam Francis’ Red in Red, Philip Guston’s The Coat II, Ellsworth Kelly’s Black Ripe and Clyfford Still’s 1957-J No. 1. Thirteen works were added to the collection in 2017 from other donors, including a painting by Los…

…ebenkorn, were leaders in the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s. The painting by Kline from 1950 expands how this selection expresses a range of approaches to formal abstraction as a means to represent the world and complex human experiences after World War II. Organized by Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, interim co-director of the Cantor and the Burton and Deedee McMurtry Curator, she says of the summer exhibition, “Anchored by landmark wor…

…sense of self, particularly through natural processes of growth, transformation, and decay. LB It’s fascinating how you play with dirt’s positive and negative meanings. KW I move between the terms “dirt,” “soil,” and “earth” because they each have different connotations. The range of meanings is what draws me to the material. In works that critique hegemonic institutions, I often say “dirt,” drawing on Mary Douglas’s ideas about how dirt transgr…

  Sept. 17: How nice to start at the top of Mt. Tamalpais with Sound Summit, an annual concert sponsored by the Roots & Branches Conservancy for the benefit of fire prevention, water conservation and visitor services on Mt. Tam. The headliners are Wilco, fresh from a stint at the Fillmore, plus Los Lobos, the Stone Foxes, and Bill Frisell doing his album Guitar in the Space Age, which ought to sound very cool in the Mountain Theater aro…

Many in the art world have been anticipating the opening on Sept. 21 of the collection of Harry and Mary Margaret Anderson at Stanford — even from afar. In 2011, the couple donated 1 21 works of contemporary art, filled with paintings by the likes of Pollock, Diebenkorn, Rothko Elsworth Kelly, de Kooning, Joan Mitchell (Begin Again IV at left), and Elizabeth Murray, to name a few, to Stanford on the condition that it build galleries to house the…